Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Chilled Blueberry Soup with Espresso, Triple Sec, and Yogurt Garnish

This is a very simple and refreshing warm-season soup that is both refreshing and nourishing. I do not have a typed recipe for this (though I do have pictures) and these are the ingredients that I used:

Make a sort of velouté with orange juice and triple sec (or other flavored alcohol of your choice). Thicken it with a cornstarch slurry, sweeten it with sugar (or honey), and flavor it with coffee. Add fresh blueberries and simmer them for just a couple minutes. Shut the flame off and add a bit of cream. The key is to balance the flavors...too much sugar will make it taste like a dessert, too much cream will make it too rich to eat, and too much alcohol will make it too harsh. Anyhow, the next thing you do is puree it in a blender and chill it.

Once thoroughly chilled it can be garnished in any number of ways, but for this recipe I chose to do a simple plate-scape with plain yogurt...it adds not only color but also a bit of tartness in each spoonful, offsetting the sweetness of the sugar and berries a bit; making the flavor more multi-dimensional.

As with any cooking use a recipe as a guide not a blueprint, but if you do need an actual printable recipe the following look pretty good (and they are all slightly different)...click here, here, here, or here. The following photos correspond with the above directions.